Thursday, December 17, 2015

At
the beginning of the year I posted a “reading guide” on Red-Green (or ‘Eco’)
Socialism. This is an expanded version of that list with more links (still, it
is far from exhaustive). It represents what I’m acquainted with by way of the
attempt to integrate Marxism (and the Left in general) with ecological and
environmental worldviews (I make some further, more specific recommendations in
the note appended below):

Bahro, Rudolf. Socialism and Survival.
London: Heretic Books, 1982.

Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green:
Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso, 1984.

See too the many works of the Marxist
geographer, David Harvey, especially the earlier stuff. I think it’s also
interesting to examine “conflicts on the ground” as it were between the Left
and Green movement parties to the extent the latter finds little or nothing of
value in the Marxist tradition (e.g., the early conflicts between the ‘Realos’
and ‘Fundis’ in West Germany and the ‘deep ecologists’ and largely Bookchin-led
and inspired ‘social ecologists’ in the US). On the Left, André Gorz (1923 –
2007), pen name of Gérard Horst (born Gerhart Hirsch, also known by his pen
name Michel Bosquet) was a New Left theorist who early on developed an
“ecological politics.” By way of prioritizing (especially with regard to
readings of Marx) and without intending to slight the other titles, I suggest
beginning with these authors: Burkett, Foster, O’Connor, Postone, and Smith.
Rudolf Bahro famously moved from Red to Green, eventually developing something
like a “deep ecology” spiritual environmentalism that largely left Marx behind
(at least rhetorically and strategically). Should you want to venture beyond
the literature above for any reason, see the bibliographies on Marxism,
“environmental and ecological politics, philosophies, and worldviews,” and “the sullied science & political economy of hyper-industrialized agriculture (or, ‘toward agroecology and food justice’),” found at my Academia page.

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